Ronald Thwaites | Collective voices for education transformation

Each week I try to visit another school to understand what you cannot glean from sitting in a ministry office or Cabinet room about the state of education in these difficult days for schooling. This time it was a large urban primary institution, eerily silent on a weekday morning, an unnatural quiet punctured occasionally by the voice of a lonely teacher speaking into a computer screen.

Is this the new education mode that some are trumpeting – the fashion of the fourth industrial revolution? Or is this the valiant but pathetic makeshift recourse forced upon us by the terror and blunted imaginations with which the invisible virus has infected us?

This particular school is doing relatively well. At least they are in touch with 85 per cent of their enrolment. “Not all of them all the time but at least sometimes”. I observe them trying so hard despite the fact that the number of tablets they were told to expect have not come and their need for instruments for the large non-PATH cohort has not been addressed.

So the principal has to decide who gets what. That is invidious but unavoidable. There is hesitation when I ask if all the teachers are cooperating. After all, less than a half of them are coming to school. There is a shrug. “And how do you keep them accountable”? That question is too intrusive for any answer.

The most stubborn problem is that the 15 per cent of students who are not connected comprise 135 in number. Very few come regularly for paper-based lessons and the guidance counsellor is on eight months leave so few home visits are possible. Those kids are lost.

Knowing the environs of the school community, I know where most of those missing children are. They are at home, on the streets and lanes, looking something to eat, learning plenty things from cable ‘trouble-vision’, Facebook and, when there is access, playing endless video games.

Yes, they have not stopped learning. But they are largely divorced from purposeful activity and that, if uncorrected, is consigning them and us to a fate as deadly as COVID-19 can be.

HAPPENING SILENTLY

It is all happening silently. And many of us are in denial or have persuaded ourselves that there is nothing more that we can do until the virus passes. What if it doesn’t?

This is why I am so supportive of Minister Fayval Williams and the Cabinet for the brave, cautious but definitive move to reopen a few schools to face-to-face learning this month. No effort should be spared to make the experiment safe and successful, thus paving the way for close to full resumption for all schools in January. Nothing else can save Jamaica’s downward social and economic spiral.

Over the next month, every school community should be charged to work out with their local health authorities the modalities for site-specific safe reopening.

At the same time, let us be realistic about the spotty application of the evaluation questionnaire which is supposed to tell us how far back our children have fallen. How universal was the take-up and what are the results? A stout remedial programme has to be highest on the agenda of every reopened school.

And wouldn’t it have been great if the once highly regarded Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) were to lead with plans for reopening and with a constructive and spirited remedy to the scandal of the school-based assessments laid bare last week! I believe in labour leading development. In education, educators, not politicians, should be the initiators of reform and the ones holding themselves and all of us accountable.

Too many school boards, principals and teachers are waiting on circulars and instructions from the ministry to tell them what to do. Even the JTA is largely reactive to government. No disrespect, but most of the educational solutions of this time are going to have to come from community initiatives acting in consort with broad national guidelines.

In this regard, the effort by some churches (the Catholics are starting and hopefully others will join) to open their halls and sanctuaries as supervised hotspots for technology-deficient students is commendable. For now especially, and even when schools reopen, offering Internet access (which I know the ministry will subsidise where needed), and thereby the opportunity for homework to be done and mentoring to take place; all are significant and affordable steps to improve social and academic outcomes.

Do this across denominational boundaries, get ministers fraternal to coordinate and supervise, and we stand the best chance of getting children off the streets and unleash a dormant social force for the good.

The collective voices of the teachers of Jamaica and the churches, who are owners or sponsors of nearly a half of Jamaica’s public schools, need to take the lead in educational transformation.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.